A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

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Consciousness (sentience) and intelligence exist at all levels of our organism, not just in the brain/mind. i.e. each nerve, each muscle cell, each organ, each "system" of the body has an intelligence and consciousness (or sentience) of its own.

Meeting innate and primal survival agendas – whilst also attending to both internal and external environmental needs – requires multi-layered communication and meaning-making at all levels of biology. The new science of Biosemiotics [1] has analysed the process of communication and meaning-making in detail and found it so inherently complex – that consciousness (sentience) and intelligence must necessarilyexist at all levels of our organism, not just in the brain/mind. i.e. each nerve, each muscle cell, each organ, each "system" of the body, even each organelle within a single cell, has an intelligence and consciousness of its own - the interactive multi-layered totality of which might be called the "body-mind".

Characteristics such as self-identity, decision-making, memory and intelligence may be observed in the behaviour of single cells. So these attributes (maybe not in a form we would immediately recognise) are present in the smallest of life-forms, were present from the very beginnings of evolution, and the physical biology has also co-evolved within a conscious intelligent framework from the very start.

These cellular organic consciousnesses can be in several states:

1. part of a greater whole,
2. of themselves (aware of other), and
3. self-referential (more than one internal frame of reference, e.g. "myself and my body" or "my adult and my inner child", or "part of me likes this but another part doesn’t"),
4. and maybe two or three of these simultaneously,

… creating an almost infinite number of possible relational configurations. The possibilities are contained within the form (the anatomy and the physical neurological, biochemical, mechanical etc. processes). So whilst the form constricts the ways that consciousness may interrelate to express itself, there is an almost infinite potential for changes in self-referential organisation within something that appears to be limited and fixed by its physicality.

The more general issue of consciousness extends out from in-dividuals to the whole cosmos. Jung was only one of many psychologists, philosophers, physicists (and more recently semioticists) who have recognised the necessity for an extended field (or something of that ilk) of a base-level of consciousness that permeates everything.

When speaking of waking consciousnes in contrast to the subconscious or the body-mind, the very idea of consciousness is extremely ill-defined. Since I take the position that everything is conscious - exactly what is "waking connsciousness""?? Many qualitative aspects - and all sensory aspects - of everyday conscious experience come from innately biological levels that would not normally be considered conscious at all - so fuzzy and ill-conceived is the common way of thinking of consciousness. Perhaps the closest we can come outside a whole library if philosophical discussions is to say that waking consciousness is the decision-making, discerning layer of conscious activity that can normally potentially exercise free will. Free will is itself a very difficult-to-define concept when one starts to explore the rabbit hole it lives in. Perhaps the answer to this is (somewhat tautologically) - that waking consciousness is the part of our being whose task is to exercise free will (and so overturn reactive gestalts) in order to better-calibrate the whole organism to its real circumstances. Thus, the exercise of free will is a subset of the sense / meaning-making / response loop.